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Antoine Duhamel, 1925-2014
Composer and conductor Antoine Duhamel died in Paris on September 10, 2014, at the age of 89.
One of the musicians most closely associated with the French New Wave, Duhamel wrote more than 60 film scores and worked with directors including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Bertrand Tavernier, Patrice Leconte and Fernando Trueba. His music combined rigorous classical technique with a willingness to experiment, resulting in scores that could be romantic, ironic, austere or deliberately disruptive.
Duhamel was born in Valmondois, near Paris, on July 30, 1925, the son of novelist Georges Duhamel and actress Blanche Albane. He studied with two of the most important figures in post-war European music, Olivier Messiaen and René Leibowitz, the latter introducing him to twelve-tone and serial techniques. Alongside cinema, Duhamel maintained a substantial career as a concert composer, writing orchestral and chamber works, songs, oratorios and operas.
His first important film collaboration was Jean-Daniel Pollet’s experimental Méditerranée (1963), but it was Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) that established his reputation. Duhamel’s music—by turns lyrical, fractured and dramatically emphatic—was used by Godard with characteristic freedom, sometimes interrupting scenes rather than conventionally supporting them. He subsequently scored Godard’s Made in U.S.A. (1966) and Weekend (1967), cementing his association with the New Wave. Read more…
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